Swedish Data Center Saves $1M a Year Using Seawater For Cooling

alphadogg writes "A data center in Sweden has cut its energy bills by a million dollars a year using seawater to cool its servers, though jellyfish are an occasional hazard. Interxion, a collocation company in the Netherlands that rents data center space in 11 countries, uses water pumped from the Baltic Sea to cool the IT equipment at its facilities in Stockholm. The energy used to cool IT equipment is one of the costliest areas of running a data center. Companies have traditionally used big, mechanical chillers, but some are turning to outside air and evaporative techniques as lower-cost alternatives."

Comments

Re:Warm the water directly

[Jherek Carnelian]

Let's all of us dump our excess heat into the ocean and see how if works out better in the long haul.

The article said the warm water is sent to heat pumps to warm up houses in the town. They don't say if they are able to bring the temperature back down to the original levels or not, or even if the water is pumped back into the ocean.

Re:Warm the water directly

[goodmanj]

Read the article: after leaving the data center, the heat is sent to a heat pump where it's used to heat houses.

It's not that salty

[techno-vampire]

The Baltic Sea isn't anywhere near as salty as it sounds. There are so many rivers emptying into it that parts of it, especially in the northern part, are very close to fresh water, and most (if not all) of the fish there are fresh water species. That's why, back in the Viking days, people in that area had to buy salt from mines in what's now Poland, instead of getting it from the sea as most other maritime areas do. This simplifies things tremendously, because they don't have to worry anywhere near as much about corrosion from the salt.